Marcia Bonta

  • Dragonflying

    “Dragonflying is good for jaded birdwatchers. It presents new challenges,” Cynthia Berger told me as we watched darting dragonflies at Whipple Dam State Park one sunny day in late July. Berger is the author of Dragonflies, an excellent new book designed for beginning dragonfly-watchers. These “glittering aerial acrobats,” Berger writes in her book, are similar…

  • Firefly Magic

    Warm July nights are lit by a sea of blinking firefly lights. To my undiscriminating eye, the flashes seem to be random. But scientists studying fireflies are able to tell most species apart by the pattern, rhythm, and color of firefly flashes. That is also the way fireflies themselves identify their own species. Such knowledge…

  • In a Milkweed Patch

    A hot day in mid-July and I am standing transfixed at the edge of a common milkweed patch, watching a bewildering number of colorful butterflies nectaring on the cluster of drooping, dusty-rose flowers. There are great-spangled fritillaries and tiger swallowtails, silver-spotted skippers and clouded sulphurs, gray hairstreaks and common sootywings, an American painted lady and…

  • Queen of the Fritillaries

    We needed military clearance to get in, but it was worth it. In a field of native little bluestem grasses, tucked between two ridges, several mature field thistles supported dozens of nectaring regal fritillary butterflies. Most were the larger, brighter, black and deep orange-colored females although we did spot a few dull-colored, worn-out males, as…

  • Walking the Lines

    “Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost once wrote. So do good surveys. After procrastinating for years, we bit the financial bullet and hired a surveyor to survey our square mile of mountain land. The surveyor was the same one who had surveyed a portion of our property years ago when we had bought some…

  • Summer’s Fiddlers

    He stalked through the grasses, ears cupped, head down. Then he squatted, still listening and looking. Steve Rannels was pursuing crickets and katydids behind the Middle Creek Management Area’s Visitors Center. My husband Bruce and I had been fascinated by the compact disc Rannels, Wil Hershberger and Joseph Dillon had recently released entitled “Songs of…

  • Passing the Torch

    Four-year-old Eva came to us last spring for a five week visit after almost a year in Honduras. “She’s forgotten most of her English,” her father Mark warned. He had continued to speak English to her, but her mother Luz and grandmother Clara, who were also visiting, conversed with her in rapid-fire Spanish. How could…

  • Insects of Indian Summer

    By November most insects are either dead or hibernating, but some species, both native and alien, are aroused by the soft warmth of Indian summer. Once again the fields and forests sing with a quieter rendition of the grasshopper-cricket-katydid chorus of late summer and early fall. Bristly great leopard moth and woolly bear caterpillars unfurl…